Weekly working hours

Table 1 collects evidence on the length of the workweek since 1870 for a sample of countries. The unit of measurement is weekly hours of full-time production workers (male and female) in non-agricultural activities. These values control for days of work. Our estimates before World War One are taken from establishment level surveys assembled by the U.S. Department of Labor in 1900. Values for 1913 are from various independent sources; where these were not available, hours are predicted based on trends from 1870 to 1900. Huberman (2004) describes the sample, the weights used in calculating national averages from sectoral figures, and the estimation method and other sources behind the 1913 figures. From 1929 to 2000 we have taken estimates from the International Labor Organization except where indicated otherwise. The U.S. series from 1929 is an amalgam of individual series constructed by selected authors using different definitions and sources. Our U.S. series approximates the levels and trends found in the Current Population Survey (Sundstrom, 2006).

There are sources of measurement error in the method we have used, not the least because national authorities may have differed in what they recorded. It may be that some authorities reported standard or legal hours, others actual hours. We consider that the series best approximate usual or normal hours the representative production worker would have been engaged for during the year. Statutory work hours came into force in many countries in the interwar years, but the series diverge from the legal norms. As for actual hours, the underlying series do not show the peaks and valleys we would expect to find if workers supplied overtime or faced downtimes because of temporary plant closures. Changes in the composition of the labor force and in work schedules across countries complicate the task of constructing long-run series of average hours per week, but for 100 years these forces had little effect. Part-time work in the period before 1913 and into the interwar years was minimal. Only in the 1970s did a sizeable proportion of the labor force in certain countries begin to work less than full-time (OECD, 1998, 2004). As for women’s hours, these tended to be close to those of men in the early years. The gap between men’s and women’s hours in many countries widened with the rise in female labor force participation in the 1960s. But since 1980 the ratio of men’s to women’s hours has been stable for most countries. The Table reports male and female work hours in 2000. By this date, European men and women worked less than their counterparts elsewhere. Of course, changes in labor supply and the rise in the number of part-timers have affected total hours worked and we control for this in constructing the annual hours of work series below. That said, since our objective is to compare national patterns, Table 1 is a reasonable starting point to examine long-term patterns in average hours worked per week by fulltimers.